Understanding Sales Trend Analysis
How conversant are you with your sales trends? Do you know what your sales look like based on region, period, or even price range? Do you know how fast your products are selling or your competitor’s? Do you know what’s causing the current trend in your sales?
As a retailer or business owner, you can’t underestimate the place of knowing your sales trends. Not keeping up with these trends can result in losing valuable market share. For instance, being oblivious about sales trends means you have no idea what your customers like; when they buy, or if they are even satisfied with your product.
As soon as you can, you need to mitigate these realities if they apply to you. Hence, you need to understand better and maximize sales trend analysis. This article will help you get started with all you should know.
What is a Sales Trend?
The sales trend involves understanding sales results and market behavior over a particular period. These results and trends help identify consumer purchase patterns over specific periods. Depending on what insight you need, the period in question may be long, short, or mid-term.
Customer segmentation underlines effective sales trends. Customer segmentation is based on products, geographical location, sales channels, etc. The process of customer segmentation groups customers with similar attributes – same purchasing behavior.
While customer segmentation can be somewhat challenging, it’s essential to sales trends for several reasons.
Why You Should Understand Sales Trends
As a retailer or business owner, understanding sales trends is vital for the following reasons:
- Sales trend helps you compare against your competitors. Hence, you gain contextual insight into your position in the industry.
- Sales trend helps your business identify areas it can do better and how you can improve customer acquisition and subsequent satisfaction.
- Sales trends provide insight into business facilities and infrastructures, informing strategy development geared towards short-term or long-term improvement. In addition, you can do long-term strategies via Predictive Modeling.
- Customer retention: every business grows, not solely because it acquires new customers, but the retention of old ones.
To enjoy these benefits, ensure an efficient technical analysis momentum.
What is Sales Trend Analysis?
Sales trend analysis involves the review of sales and revenue results across different streams to connect dots and draw patterns. Sales trend analysis is a subset of budgeting and financial analysis vital to a company.
Sales trend analysis goes beyond what the immediate trend line shows. It involves understanding sales and its supporting contexts in great detail. You want to know when, why, how, where, etc., every sales action across every channel.
The analysis becomes critical if your company sells classes across different regions to varying customer classes. When sales trend analysis is done right, your business gets to make better predictions, decisions, and changes across the board.
Some common examples of sales trend analysis are;
- Sales by product: Here, you want to know which products are selling best
- Sales by region: Where are the products selling best?
- Sales by customer: What type of customers buy the products more? Are they satisfied? Why is a set of customers not buying? Etc.
- Sales by Channel: Are we selling best on Facebook or Instagram? Landing page or Twitter?
- Sales by Contract: Do we need to extend the contract with a company (since they are buying very well)?
While the data involved in sales trend analysis are passed, they can inform the future. Hence, the knowledge of how to conduct sales trend analysis is vital.
How to Conduct Sales Trend Analysis
Conducting sales trend analysis is simple when you have the needed resources. However, knowing how to maximize resources is crucial beyond having the resources.
Setup Your Analysis Environment.
During sales trend analysis, the first thing to do is to identify the software you’ll use. There are several software choices for this purpose. The most common software for sales trend analysis is Microsoft Excel. If you’re excellent at using Microsoft Excel, you can do impressive things.
Some managers can use MS excel to unlock insights and even set up alerts. With excel, you can handle large amounts of data and create custom dashboards. You can also create graphs that visualize crucial metrics with the built-in tools.
Creating a Data Analytics Software
If your company has the resources, you can set up a proprietary data analytics system that sources data and analyses the same. Such software will also feature an intuitive dashboard. With this software, you also don’t have to manually input data as you’ll do with excel. As a result, customer data analytics infrastructure aids efficiency and minimizes error.
Conclusion
Sales Trend is vital to a business – it can make or break it. As a business owner, if you are not adept at monitoring sales trends, it is best to get a professional. Sales trend analysis costs time, effort, and money, but the ROI puts your business on a growth trajectory.
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